Imagen del autor

Alan Gould (1) (1949–)

Autor de To the Burning City

Para otros autores llamados Alan Gould, ver la página de desambiguación.

25+ Obras 115 Miembros 5 Reseñas

Sobre El Autor

Créditos de la imagen: Alan Gould 18/07/2010 photograph by Sue.

Series

Obras de Alan Gould

To the Burning City (1991) 15 copias
The Man Who Stayed Below (1984) 13 copias
The Schoonermaster's Dance (2000) 12 copias
Close ups (1994) 11 copias
The tazyrik year: A novel (1998) 7 copias
The pausing of the hours (1984) 5 copias
Capital (2014) 4 copias
The seaglass spiral (2012) 4 copias
The twofold place (1986) 3 copias
A fold in the light (2001) 2 copias
Years found in likeness (1988) 2 copias
Momentum (1992) 2 copias
Astral sea : poems (1981) 2 copias
Dalliance & scorn poems (1999) 1 copia
Icelandic solitaries (1978) 1 copia
Folk Tunes (2009) 1 copia

Obras relacionadas

The Best Australian Stories 2012 (2012) — Contribuidor — 15 copias

Etiquetado

Conocimiento común

Miembros

Reseñas

Shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award and the NBC Banjo Award in 1992, To the Burning City was Alan Gould's second novel, following his award-winning debut The Man Who Stayed Below (1984). I have yet to source a copy of that, and there are some others I'd like to find, because (as you can see from my reviews), I like this author's work very much.

An award-winning poet, essayist and novelist, Gould (b.1949) was born in postwar England but his father's military career took the family to Northern Ireland, Germany and Singapore before migration to Australia in 1966. He is based in Canberra. His novels include:

  • The Man Who Stayed Below (1984) winner of the 1984 Colin Roderick Award

  • To the Burning City (1991)

  • Close Ups (1994), read back in 1994. I may yet publish my review from the reading journal archive, despite its flaws.

  • The Tazyrik Year (1998)

  • The Schoonermaster's Dance (2001), see my review

  • The Lakewoman (2009), shortlisted for the 2010 Prime Minister's Awards

  • The Seaglass Spiral (2012), see my review

  • The Poet's Stairwell (2015), see my review and a Sensational Snippet


To the Burning City explores the relationship between two half-brothers, Jeb and Len, prompting me to muse that while blended families are common now through divorce, even when divorce was uncommon in the postwar period, they must have been common enough when women widowed by war remarried. Yet even so, the relationship between step-siblings isn't common in the fiction I've read. To the Burning City shows how Len's father Flight Officer Crispin a.k.a. Charlie Hengelow — one of those who aimed the bombs at their targets — did not die in the war, but rather deserted his family to deal with his postwar inner demons. The novel explores how Jeb, who as a child hero-worshipped his older half-brother, struggled with these complex relationships in adulthood.

Being one of the fatherless, was what little Len feared when sent off to boarding school aged four...
There were boys whose fathers got killed. This didn't happen often, but when it did someone you knew, someone you had been playing with only yesterday evening, in the schoolyard or down among the ferns, would emerge from Miss Leverton's study with a face that had turned the same blotchy pink as the Empire countries in the atlas. Miss Leverton or Matron would help them pack an overnight bag and drive them in the school car to the station where they were put onto a train which took them to their mothers. They would be gone for a fortnight or so, and then they would reappear in the classroom one day. They would act quite normal, a bit quieter at first. But they were different somehow, it was difficult to say exactly why. (p.13)

Len prays for his father every night, all through the long years of the war, when he sees his father only a couple of times, and each time he leaves without saying goodbye. But Len's prayers don't deliver his father safely back to the family after the war, and without anybody explaining why, there is a divorce, and his mother remarries, to Group Captain Wilfred Corballis. Another child is born — Jeb — and they move about a lot, as families in the forces do.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2024/02/13/to-the-burning-city-1991-by-alan-gould/
… (más)
 
Denunciada
anzlitlovers | Feb 13, 2024 |
Keen to support both authors and bookshops, I've just bought Chris Flynn's Mammoth and Robbie Arnott's The Rain Heron, which caused a minor crisis on the A-G Australian authors section of the TBR. No room. I was sorely tempted to read one or other of them right away, but The Schoonermaster's Dance waved at me, reminding me that I'd shelved it back in 2013 after a successful hunt for Alan Gould's backlist after I discovered rel="nofollow" target="_top">The Seaglass Spiral.

So here we are, and what an absorbing book it is, offering much to think about besides the obvious theme of obsession.

Forty-something Sarah Tilber is friends with Jenn, and has been since their schooldays in England. The story of how Sarah's obsession with her ancestor Charles Harling Tilber gets out of hand is narrated by Jenn... who learns most of it through Sarah's letters and postcards and the occasional visit. Jenn is the wife of a schoolmaster in England, and Sarah is the wife of a librarian in Canberra.

Or was. The story begins with Sarah's mystifying disappearance. Her father's death severed her sense of connection to things, and so she left her job at the NLA (where she was a librarian too); she left Kieran, her kindly but claustrophobia-inducing husband; and she set off on a lengthy odyssey to find the traces of this long-dead great-uncle. And somehow, with the circumstances unknown, she disappears in July 1990, somewhere between the border of Peru and Chile.

Jenn, who mourns her still, tells Sarah's story to ensure that her friend has a presence in this world. Sarah had no children (and seemed not to like them much either) and nothing remains of her possessionless life except—like her ancestor—in the traces of other people's lives. So in the same way that Sarah was wholly absorbed in 'establishing' the fact of Charlie Tilber's life, so too is Jenn, using the same word 'establish' to assert the importance of her narration of Sarah's life. Despite her misgivings about her friend's absorption in the past life of an ordinary person, Jenn has taken on the same behaviour.

CHT (as Sarah often abbreviates him) was a man who spent his life at sea, and died alone in an aged care home. But by a series of lucky events, Sarah meets a man who served on the same ship as a boy, and this creates a sense of connection to the great days of sail. A newspaper clipping about a tragic voyage exists, and Sarah uses this to imagine reasons for the haunting that seemed to have been part of CHT's melancholy persona. The tragedy also enables Sarah to invest her great-uncle with a kind of tragic hero status.

Jenn, describing this situation, notes that her friend is detached from the present and the real people in her life (not just Kieran the hang-dog husband but also an uncle, a sister and some nephews in England). The way that she seems wholly absorbed by the past becomes a kind of cautionary tale about the obsessive amateur sleuthing that goes on among many family historians.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2020/06/06/the-schoonermasters-dance-by-alan-gould/… (más)
 
Denunciada
anzlitlovers | otra reseña | Jun 5, 2020 |
Is poetry in a poet’s DNA? Or is something somehow acquired, when after trudging up a dark and constricted stairwell, the poet bursts into the light and sees with clarity?

Two Australian friends, Claude Boon and Henry Luck, take off on the Grand Tour of Europe to pay homage to the poets of the past, and to find their muses. Luck is the younger, a scholarly genius destined for great things in the world of poetry, while Boon, the narrator, becomes less sure of his destiny. Together they make their way through England, the land of their birth, and on to Ireland and Europe – from Greece and Turkey to ventures behind the Iron Curtain.

The book is subtitled a picaresque novel and the escapades follow the form but the novel has a coherence that I found missing from (dare I say it?) Candide. Like Gould himself, Boon in Australia works at labouring jobs after he has finished university, and in the first moment of tension in his relationship with Luck, he takes him to visit the worksite where the particle accelerator is being built at a thinly-disguised ANU in Canberra. Luck is forever insisting that Boon read this or that poet to plug the gaps in his poetic education, for Boon, achieving only middling honours in his degree, had spent some of his university years involved in politics (including the 1971 ‘Day of Rage’ protests against the Springbok Tour of Australia) and he admits later in the book that he had only read Dante in comic book form. Boon demands a trade off:

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2016/05/17/the-poets-stairwell-by-alan-gould/
… (más)
 
Denunciada
anzlitlovers | Jul 17, 2016 |
"There is properly no history, only biography" - Emerson.

Really enjoyed this book, could relate to Sarah's enthusiasm & passion for history. There's a lot in this story that will appeal to Maritime devotees and those into shipping history from the late 1800's to the 1940's. Interesting stuff on how she traced her great uncle's seafaring days.

Interesting how the past and one's ancestors' multitudinous lives get inside your bones. Sarah asks "Does the past affect you in a similar way?" For her "it's the sensation of being somehow....hived with former lives. It's a power." She elaborates her interest thus.... "Can I confine my purpose with great uncle to a biography at all? Yes, if it begins and ends with simply wanting to to capture a person's life story. But my impulse towards bygone matters is altogether more peculiar when I examine it closely. I think it is to do with wanting to "inhabit" more of time than has been given to me, to inhabit Uncle's time as intimately as the moments of my own time. Perhaps everyone hankers after this "identification" with what has gone before."

I don't think I've come across anyone before stating those same feelings (that I have about history, and one's ancestors and the need to "know"), and is why Sarah's story resonates with me.

She does follow her research that leads all over the world ending somewhere unknown in South America. Her friends & family though take an uninterested and dim view of it all, especially her best friend Jennifer who sees it as unhealthy and not connected to the "real". It is Jennifer's fears that come to bear in the end....and where the writer takes a turn down that mystical twist road again, rather than writing a satisfactory ending. I'm sure there's a place for mystical twists but I didn't think it required one here.

… (más)
 
Denunciada
velvetink | otra reseña | Mar 31, 2013 |

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Obras
25
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2
Miembros
115
Popularidad
#170,830
Valoración
4.0
Reseñas
5
ISBNs
42
Idiomas
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